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by Bruce Maulden

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Debating Reality

October 16, 2012

Raining this early Tuesday morning up here along California’s northern coast, the first of the so-called rainy season, though, it did get wet back in July. And it’s fairly warm, temps expected to be in the low 60s today.

Of course, the big-ticket item is tonight’s debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney and this one could be fun — a town hall format where some tricky shit could easily pop a political balloon.

And maybe, just freakin’ maybe, somebody will ask the most-perilous and most-needed question of all — what will you two clowns do about climate change?

While farmers nationwide planted the most corn this year since 1937, growers in Kansas sowed the fewest acres in three years, instead turning to less-thirsty crops such as wheat, sorghum and even triticale, a wheat-rye mix popular in Poland. Meanwhile, corn acreage in Manitoba, a Canadian province about 700 miles north of Kansas, has nearly doubled over the past decade due to weather changes and higher prices. Shifts such as these reflect a view among food producers that this summer’s drought in the United States — the worst in half a century — isn’t a random disaster. It’s a glimpse of a future altered by climate change that will affect worldwide production. “These changes are happening faster than plants can adapt, so we will see substantial impacts on global growing patterns,” said Axel Schmidt, a former senior scientist for the International Center for Tropical Agriculture now with Catholic Relief Services. While there is still debate about how human activity is altering the climate, agriculture is already adapting to shifting weather patterns.

Not too much debate, though — not much official talk at all. Listed here are some much-needed questions someone in the debate audience will hopefully ask.

The rub is in the politics — both Demos and GOPers are even going after tonight’s debate moderator, Candy Crowley of CNN, because they’re scared of a shotgun question that will f*ck-up the hi-jinks. Read Time‘s background on the subject: As Crowley put it last week, â€œOnce the table is kind of set by the town-hall questioner, there is then time for me to say, â€˜Hey, wait a second, what about X, Y, Z?â€™â€ A possible concept which has to frighten the living-shit out of Romney.

A must-read essay about the nexus of climate change can be found at Aljazeera English — the enemy is us in just living as we do in the nowadays. A money quote:

Members of this elite group — people like me — tend to have cellphones, personal computers and housing with central heating and air conditioning. We typically use electric or gas-driven clothing dryers. More often than not, we own cars and we travel occasionally, sometimes frequently, by flying — the single most ecologically destructive individual act of consumption one can undertake. (A single roundtrip flight between New York and London produces, in terms of its impact on the climate system, the equivalent of two metric tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per economy class passenger — more than the emissions produced by an average resident of Brazil for an entire year.)

A long piece, but worth the time — kind of reveals what’s needed, and in between the lines, of the shear hopelessness of the earth’s elites. Bye-bye, good-bye.